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August 26, 2007

Moderation

JoS comments are now moderated.

This will hinder discussions somewhat, but the ability for us to gather and chat without interruption is certainly worth it. (And with a three-game series in New York up next, this is very good timing.)

There should be little lag, if any, in comment approval during games. Obviously, when I'm away from the computer, there will delays.

91 comments:

This is my dilemma at my blog--having to put on the moderation for the sole reason of keeping out a few psychos.

But having had it on for a few months now, I kind of can't believe I used to "leave my blog alone" for so long! You're away from a computer for a day and that could be a day of having some horrible things said about you sitting there for everyone to see.

Wow. Maybe I'm stupid......But I would think there would be a way where we could sign up and have preapproval for comments and any new members who would like to post can then do so....and you can boot out after you find they may be trolls.....

But I would think there would be a way where we could sign up and have preapproval for comments and any new members who would like to post can then do so....and you can boot out after you find they may be trolls.....

This is what I was thinking of doing. But it is not as simple as this. If I did this, everyone that I approved of would be a "member" of the blog -- and would have rights to post.

I considered doing that (but telling everyone that they could comment only) -- this was right before Cakey started Threadsox -- but that seemed like it could turn into a headache.

So you get an email everytime someone posts........so in the last 2 days you got over a 1000 emails.?

I do usually get an email whenever anyone leaves a comment to any post, but in Gmail, they often get combined into long strings of many emails. Some will have 10 different comments, some will have 65. All of s1c's come in their own long email - only his comments.

Anyway, I delete those without reading them since I see them all in the game thread.

Was it that bad? With L running interference too? Are game threads not moderated? I am confused by your comment about s1c's comments being in the game thread already so you delete the emails. please advise

Was it that bad? With L running interference too? Are game threads not moderated? I am confused by your comment about s1c's comments being in the game thread already so you delete the emails. please advise

Nothing was moderated before today. Everyone's comments come to me as emails, with the text of the comment and a link to the post it was made in.

The game thread emails have the game thread title as the subject line, so if I was refreshing the game thread, I would know that all of those emails were fine -- they didn't need to be read.

Today, the troll was copying and pasting the same message into one comment after the next after the next. Deleting them one at a time was taking longer than it took the troll to post them.

So I turned off comments completely for five minutes, cleaned things up, and enabled moderation.

Was it that bad? With L running interference too? Are game threads not moderated?

I moderated the game thread today. I deleted about 30-40 comments. Most came in big bunches.

To those in the game thread today, did it go pretty quickly? Did your comments show up pretty fast?

During the Yankees series, it will be faster, because I'll be home watching the games on TV, so I can just keep the moderation screen up, refresh, publish, refresh, publish. I won't also chat in the game thread, but that's ok.

Today it may have been slower b/c I was trying to follow the game on Gameday, and also post in the thread. Plus it was my first day. :)

So you get an email everytime someone posts........so in the last 2 days you got over a 1000 emails.?

You can set Blogger to email you comments or not. You can have the comments emailed to any address.

I suggested setting it so the JoS comments would all go to Trollzapper's address, and I could delete them from there. No moderation necessary.

But Allan (and Jere) convinced me that wouldn't work for this troll's "flooding" methods. It takes too many steps: you get the email, you go to the blog, you delete, you confirm deletion, you refresh. Moderation requires only one step: publish/reject.

I'm assuming you've read that JoS had hundreds of obscene troll posts in the last few days, including LOTS that came in huge bunches.

Are the trolls just pissed off yankee fans or just people who are pissed off at someone in general......i wasn't able to see any of the comments , so i will assume they were either graphic or just very immature...I guess peolpe may not understand because they don't know any of the things that were written.......

I'm in support of whatever keeps the site and its hosts healthy. If they can deal with the overhead of moderation and that keeps the trolls away, I'm all for it. If, in the future, the troll invasion gets bored and goes away, I'd enjoy a return to unmoderated, but refer to the first sentence overall.

Now then, I'm thinking a JoS spinoff: "The Dong Show" whose theme song would be, of course "Get it On (Bang a Dong)".

9C, you're right: people didn't see the posts, so they don't know. I don't want to repeat them. I'll just say they were crude (and not in a fun way), worthless, and Yankee-loving.

Redsock, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that you do NOT want to leave Blogger. I investigated that route thoroughly while I was trying to fix all my blog issues. Knowing your blogging needs, I can confidently report that you do want to stay with Blogger, and not because it's free.

I'm certainly not dissing blogger. As a rule, I'm a big fan of Google. It would be great if they could add an "approved commentor" level though. I know others have done this, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it in the future. Emailing them and explaining the issue might be worth the effort.

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I was only around for the first hour, but the delay seemed pretty minor to me, for what it's worth.

Sadly, no. That's the biggest problem with Blogger: no support. But you can post it to a group, that sometimes helps.

I don't love everything about Blogger, but for various reasons, it's the best alternative - esp if you want web-based blogging. There's great software you can download, but Allan and I both need to be able to blog from anywhere.

I was only around for the first hour, but the delay seemed pretty minor to me, for what it's worth.

I'm impressed by your dedication, and I was there when the troll attacked.

The problem with the fans rivalry is they end up hating each other and hating that other team and those other players, and that's too bad. I pride myself, being an all-around baseball fan is being able to recognize the good players and the good plays even if they're enemy players. It's fun sometimes to do the nicknames and things, and I'm sure you've all had fun getting into a pissing match with a yankee fan at one point or another.

But there is always someone who wants to start something against someone else. So all you can do is change how you go about things a little bit. It's too bad we'll be missing l-girl's comments but I applaud you for taking one for the team.

I'm watching the Sunday Night Baseball, and it is certainly getting interesting. 6-2 Dodgers but the Mets have Reyes at third and Lastings Milledge at first with David Wright batting, 1 out. This leads me to a question: Do you guys have any National League teams you can say you're a fan of? Personally, the two NL teams I like are the Mets and Braves. Makes their head-to-head games fun to watch.

How does he like scoring the games? I score once in awhile, actually right on the computer, but I may start going back to hard copies soon. Maybe this post-season. It certainly keeps you in the game and helps you remember things that happened much better than just watching.

I find it hard to focus on a game that the Red Sox (or Yankees for that matter) aren't playing in, but I like watching baseball. So it helps me enjoy the games better when I've got someone to root for.

My wife (as I've said before, but not recently) grew up on Long Island about 45 minutes from Shea. So there is a strong Mets sympathy in the house. Our seven year old son is a bit conflicted, so a Sox-Mets WS will be interesting if it happens again.

There is hope though, she bought a new Red Sox hat for our trip to Fenway on Sept 2.

Not exactly conventional, but it worked for me. The problem is that there's too much work involved with it. I think for kicks and giggles I'll score Tuesday night's game by hand and see how that comes out.

"I find it hard to focus on a game that the Red Sox (or Yankees for that matter) aren't playing in, but I like watching baseball. So it helps me enjoy the games better when I've got someone to root for."

That's cool. When we go other parks, I usually find some reason to root (a little) for one team or the other.

I'd love to have a baseball scoring program that can do a lot of the formating of box scores and scorecards for you. But right now it either costs too much money or is just a wish. I'll guarantee any program wouldn't do what I'd want it to do.

It makes me wonder how they do the scoring on ESPN.com and other websites. That would be a pretty cool job to score the games for ESPN.com

For the record, I thought the posting delays were minimal and didn't detract at all from the experience. Would love to be blogging with you on T-TH, but out of town without computer, except on cell phone. Maybe I'll try from cellphone internet browser. That's likely how I'll be keeping up with the game, unfortunately.

Ish: outline what you want the program to do (maybe specifically some things you couldn't find). I'm betting there's a half decent option out there. I'll look around when I get back to school in two days. If there really is no decent option, I might do it sometime :)

Wow, I posted the first comment to this and figured nobody would further the discussion (for some reason). Now I see 80 comments have gone by before I checked in again.

This was talked about already, but essentially: For the people that think the moderation is unnecessary, if you liked how it went during yesterday's game, you like the site with moderation. You didn't see the spam comments because they were deleted so quickly.

Joy: maybe you could be the stat-stringer for the Jays next season....

I went to that Yankee blog (can't believe I just said that) by the O's stat stringer and about his thing about road attendance: He should note that more fans in visiting cities that go to see the Yanks are going specifically because they hate them, while more road Sox game fans are there rooting FOR the Sox, which is part of the reason there are (nearly as?, a little more than?, doesn't really matter) as many people at Yankee road games as Red Sox road games. Proof: 50,000 people in Chicago chanting Yankees Suck with the Yanks in town vs chanting Lets Go Red Sox with the Red Sox in town. He should know that most cities harbor a decades-long hatred of the Yanks, regardless of how they feel about the Red Sox.

You can still use blogger for publishing, nothing needs to change at all really. The basic advantage of hosting it on your own domain is that you can block an IP address or range of addresses from accessing your blog.

Post a comment on my test blog, you can see that it goes through blogger.